Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper of Pennsylvania’s 3rd district (roughly the northwest corner of the state) put this press release on her Web site on March 24, announcing that, “The Mercer County Housing Authority is slated to receive $1,703,727 as part of the Capital Fund Program.” A second reference to the project can be found on USASpending.gov. The ultimate source of the funds is the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

I called Mercer County Housing Authority and the regional HUD office to find out more about the project–what is its status, have contracts been awarded, are they reporting information to federal or state officials and if so what information are they reporting. Based on what I found, I ended up not asking some other questions: How many jobs had been created to date or exactly how much of the $1.7 million has been spent so far. It seems that this particular project is just getting started. I also learned that HUD’s time line for spending stimulus dollars only requires that recipients have legally binding contracts in place within a year of funds being awarded–not that they spend a certain percentage of the funds available to them.

Jim Cassidy, director of the HUD Office of Public Housing in Pittsburgh, Pa., said HUD awarded the funds through a block grant formula — a complicated bit of algebra that divided among public housing authorities the stimulus money available for the Capital Fund Program. Cassidy told me that the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act directed $4 billion to the Capital Fund Program, which pays for development and modernization of public housing. “$3 billion was awarded on a formula basis,” he said; housing authorities will compete for the other $1 billion.

Stimulus spending through the Capital Fund Program is being done on an expedited basis. I don’t mean to sound flippant, but expedited for the federal government is a relative term: instead of projects having a four year life cycle, recipients will have to spend it in three years. The expedited time line goes like this:

March 18, 2009: Funds obligated (that is, each public housing authority in the country receives approval letter saying they’re getting a certain amount of money)
March 17, 2010: Public housing authorities have to have a legally binding contract (or contracts) in place to spend the money.
By March 17, 2011, Public housing authorities are required to spend at least 60 percent of the stimulus funds they were awarded.
By March 17, 2012, PHAs are required to spend 100 percent of the stimulus funds awarded.

So how is this playing out on the ground? Beth Burkhart, the administrative director of the Mercer County Housing Authority, says they’ve decided how to spend their stimulus funds — converting efficiency units in the Vermeire Manor retirement home to one bedroom apartments — and that HUD has approved the project. They have some firms lined up to do some of the work (this public notice in the Sharon, Pa., Herald lists them — Perfido Weiskopf Architects and asbestos contractor AGX, Inc.; they’re still looking for help with plumbing, electrical work, HVAC and a general contractor). On July 2, they’ll hold a pre-bid conference, with bids due on July 14.

I asked a lot of questions about what information would be reported to Recovery.gov, but both Cassidy and Burkhart explained that they had yet to receive that guidance from HUD, and just weren’t sure yet what the reporting requirements would look like.

Currently, Recovery.gov has a spreadsheet that tells you that $212,155,156 has been obligated for all of all of Pennsylvania under HUD’s Capital Fund Program. Mercer County Housing Authority, or even the generic term “public housing authority,” doesn’t appear. I didn’t do as thorough a search, but I couldn’t find a reference to the project on Pennsylvania’s recovery site (here’s the page for Mercer County projects).

To do this story, which involved looking into various agencies in charge of the bailout of the financial sector, we had to file seven FOIA requests–all sent via fax to Treasury–then make several phone calls to follow up on our request. We had to justify our request for a fee waiver in some calls, but most were devoted to patiently, politely cajoling FOIA officers to expedite our requests. It took us more than three months from the time the first FOIA was sent out to when we could compile all the material we needed to publish the story. All we wanted was a list of names of people in charge of making decisions about which bank gets money under the bailout–information that presumably shouldn’t require a FOIA request.

Despite President Obama’s January 21 directive to agencies to act in the spirit of openness and make an effort to improve the FOIA process, our recent experiences with Treasury,  the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and others that regulate banks and are central to the bailout haven’t been much different than our experiences with the Bush administration. Earlier, FOIA requests sent to Treasury took almost the same time, even without the phone calls trying to expedite the process.

The reason Treasury doesn’t accept FOIA requests via e-mail is because of an internal regulation that requires the person making a request to submit a signature, according to Hugh Gilmore, the public FOIA liaison for the agency. Treasury also requires that they need a requester to say that they are willing to pay a minimum of $25.00 for the documents requested.

Acknowledging that the number of requests coming into Treasury as a result of the bailout and setting up of the Office of Financial Stability has increased, Gilmore said that they have added eight to ten people to handle the influx. “We are changing the methods used to answer FOIA requests with the increased use of technology, especially for the Office of Financial Stability,” Gilmore said. Keeping with the memo Treasury is changing internal policies and will be adopting amended provisions of transparency with regards to FOIA.

This report by the Sunshine in Government Initiative looks at performance of federal agencies sums up the state of FOIA in 2008, “Despite reforms enacted by Congress and an order from the last administration to do a better job, federal agencies continue to give those seeking information a frustrating and oftentimes unsatisfying experience.”

In January 2007 when Real Time started to regularly seek logs of correspondence between Members of Congress and federal agencies, we sent out FOIA requests to more than 120 agencies. Only a handful responding in a timely fashion; most required frequent phone calls to follow up on the requests. And in the past two years only a dozen agencies have given us the logs of correspondences in the electronic format we’ve asked for–that is, as an excel or comma separated format. Over the last couple of years, the project morphed into sending out FOIAs to fewer agencies on a quarterly basis.

This was mainly to weed out agencies which insisted giving us paper records that were not very interesting–for example, the National Endowment for the Humanities sends every member of Congress monthly letters announcing grantees in their districts and states. We have boxes of them.

The major difference that we’ve noticed at Real Time this year is that we are receiving acknowledgments of the FOIA requests faster, but not the information we had asked for. Agencies also seem keen now to clear up their backlog of requests from previous years. We have received calls from three agencies — all branches of the Department of Defense — in reference to FOIAs we sent out in early 2007 asking if we still need the responses.

There’s also some XML schemas for those submitting machine readable data.

Still, it was jarring to see those excel spread sheets at the top of the document.

As a senator, Barack Obama denounced the Bush administration for holding “secret energy meetings” with oil executives at the White House. But last week public-interest groups were dismayed when his own administration rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for Secret Service logs showing the identities of coal executives who had visited the White House to discuss Obama’s “clean coal” policies. One reason: the disclosure of such records might impinge on privileged “presidential communications.” The refusal, approved by White House counsel Greg Craig’s office, is the latest in a series of cases in which Obama officials have opted against public disclosure.

Anu is our FOIA maven and is going to audit our FOIA log to see whether there’s been any improvement in response times since Obama issued a memorandum stating, in part, “All agencies should adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA, and to usher in a new era of open Government. The presumption of disclosure should be applied to all decisions involving FOIA.”

Don’t take my word for it, but my guess is that we won’t see much improvement.

While we wait for Anu to crunch the numbers, I thought an anecdote might be useful. Back in March 2007, I FOIAed the Office of Naval Research for information on a contract it awarded to a company called Mobilvox. Mobilvox was of interest for several reasons: they’d hired a bunch of different lobbyists — the now defunct PMA Group, KSA Consulting (which employed Rep. John Murtha’s brother), Chambers & Associates (whose name partner worked for Randy “Duke” Cunningham), and GSP Consulting, a Pittsburgh-based firm that includes a former Murtha staffer. They’d gotten earmarks from both Murtha and Rep. James Moran, and they maintained offices in both districts.

When I FOIAed the Office of Naval Research, I asked for a copy of the above linked contract, any correspondence with ONR regarding the contract (including letters, emails, faxes, etc.), any forms SF-LLL (see here for an explanation of what that is). I won’t bore you with the details of my dealings with the two different private contractors that handle FOIA requests for ONR, or the multiple contacts I’ve gotten asking (perhaps hoping against hope) that I was no longer interested in seeing my FOIA request fulfilled.

In January 2008, I received some of the pages of the contract (no correspondence yet). Missing were five pages that included the description of work to be performed and pricing information — I learned last week that ONR “is still in the process of working with the submitter regarding redacting these pages” — a full six months after I got part of the contract and fifteen months after I filed my initial FOIA request.

Waiting for FOIA requests was always like watching paint dry–it still is. Third party contractors still do a lot of the work of responding to FOIA requests and private entities mentioned in FOIA requests can review information requested and argue against its disclosure. It’s a slow, cumbersome process encrusted with all sorts of different rules. A “presumption to disclosure” doesn’t by itself fix anything.

Aristotle International and NGP have nearly exclusive control of a market that appeared virtually overnight when the FEC introduced electronic filing requirements in 2001. The companies write and sell software that manages records of—and takes a cut of—nearly all campaign donations, which amounted to more than $1 billion in the 2008 election cycle. The software costs tens of thousands of dollars per copy.

In testimony in the suit, NGP Software, which bills itself “the leading provider of fundraising and compliance software for Democratic campaigns” on its Web site, acknowledged a hidden partnership with Capital Advantage under which NGP’s software was re-branded and sold to PACs that, in the 2006 cycle, gave more to Republicans than they did to Republicans. NGP has for years scored points with Democratic congressional offices by advertising that it worked “solely with Democrats and their allies.” Aristotle casts itself as a nonpartisan technology provider.

When a reporter tried to obtain a copy of the partnership agreement with Capital Advantage last October—which like many records in the case was sealed to the public—NGP said she might be an agent of Aristotle. Aristotle had, in fact, helped the freelance reporter, Alison Gregor, prepare the legal paperwork, and has also launched an aggressive public relations campaign aimed at convincing Democrats to demand a refund and switch to Aristotle. The suit seeks all profits made by NGP by selling to Democrats.

Aristotle, founded in 1983, stressed its nonpartisan credentials as a provider of software for campaigns—it boasts that the 1992 presidential campaigns of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot all used its software. The company dominated the market for filing software when the FEC first mandated that House and presidential campaigns and political action committees disclose their contributions electronically, but it has lost a tremendous amount of business to NGP in recent years.

NGP was paid $5.6 million in the 2008 election cycle by PACs and House and presidential candidates, compared to $2.8 million paid to Aristotle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. (The amount paid by Senate candidates is unknown because they do not file electronically.) Some 169 Democratic members of the House used NGP, while 147 members used Aristotle—all but 35 of them Republicans.

Expenditure reports filed with the FEC show that Capital Advantage (now owned by the parent company of newspaper Roll Call) was paid $146,000 for helping groups that, at the time the suit was filed, were far more generous to Republicans than Democrats, raise money. A Web site paid for by Aristotle, NotRobinHood.com, lists Republicans who have received money from those PACs, implying that Democrats who use NGP software are unwittingly supporting their political opponents.

But Capital Advantage has never worked directly for a Republican candidate, and while it did raise money for the RNC, the PACs it raised money for in 2008 gave slightly more money to Democrats than they did Republicans. Corporate PACs tend to support incumbents, and, with some exceptions of course, the party in control of Congress generally gets more support from them.

Aristotle says in court filings that NGP’s fierce determination to keep the agreement secret proves its significance. NGP says they’re not concerned with the truth coming out so much as they are with what Aristotle would do to “misrepresent” the facts.

The rival companies demanded every piece of information they could get out of each other, fishing for damaging information in discovery while agreeing to keep the information sealed from the public. NGP and Aristotle both sought at times to limit disclosure, sealing even deliberations about what should be kept hidden.

By contrast, the heated competition between the firms is no secret in Washington circles.

NGP’s CEO, Nathaniel Pearlman, served as Chief Technology Officer for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, for which he was paid about $1 million. He began his career at Aristotle, but left to start his own company because he couldn’t stand the thought of helping Republicans, he told the Wall Street Journal in 2006.

In court filings, NGP downplayed Pearlman’s partisanship, arguing instead that Aristotle, whose revenues had actually increased from $8 million to $14 million during the period of NGP’s alleged misconduct, couldn’t prove it was harmed. Even if customers switched, NGP argued, it was because NGP offered a better product, not because of its ideology.

“That’s almost like a person who kills his parents and then claims he’s an orphan,” a lawyer for Aristotle, Robert Bredhoff, told the trial judge. “Their ads emphasize over and over that ‘people choose us because we’re partisan.’”

Secrecy—and alleged secrecy—is as much an issue in the trial as partisanship. “You used the statement several times that they have a secret, concealed relationship with CapAd,” the judge, Thomas Hogan, asked Bredhoff. “You get that from where?”

“This is not known to the general public,” argued Bredhoff. “The reason they don’t want it out there is because it completely contradicts their message, which they promulgate constantly. It was not known to anybody until this litigation began, and it’s been agreed by the parties in the course of this litigation that that fact remain secret.”

“There’s an awful lot under seal in this case,” Hogan said of the battle between two firms that make money in part from the FEC electronic disclosure business. “I think we may eventually have to look.”

Read more over at Party Time.

Whoops! That may have been taking bipartisanship a bit far, especially since the NRCC is targeting Peters right now for “going on a reckless spending spree.”

Minutes after sending that list out, the NRCC sent out a new list: “Please disregard previous Calendar of Events. See attached.”  Mention of the Peters fundraiser had disappeared.

The medical industry paid for more travel than any other single interest – over $10 million for some 8,700 trips, or about 40 percent of all outside sponsored travel. Among the targets: military pharmacists, doctors, and others who administer the Pentagon’s $6 billion-plus annual budget for prescription drugs

I would have expected Defense contractors to be number one. I hope CPI follows up on it. In any case, the project shows you never know what you’ll find when you dig into federal records.

Essentially, Flake is asking the committee to hold that, for earmarks, campaign contributions create a conflict of interest in the same way that, say, being part owner of a company would create a conflict of interest: The more flush the company is with federal contracts gotten through earmarks, the better off its (presumably greater number of) employees would be, and thus would have more donors with more money to contribute to the member’s campaign.

Putting on a policy hat for a moment, in some ways H.Res. 6, which required members to declare that neither they nor their spouses had a financial interest in the recipients to whom they were directing earmarked funds, opened the door to this. Congressional ethics rules (such as they are) deal with conflicts of interest not through prohibitions but through transparency. Thus, a member like Rep. Marion Berry of Arkansas can vote to increase the farm subsidies that he receives. It’s up to voters in his district to determine whether that’s a conflict of interest. Regulation of campaign contributions works the same way — and, as previously noted on Real Time, the Justice Department even assumes “they are almost always given and received with a generalized expectation of currying favor with the candidate benefitting therefrom.”

While members will most likely ignore it, Flake’s letter raises some very interesting issues in how Congress deals with ethics regulations: is it better to prohibit behaviors, or make them transparent and trust to voters to decide the ethical boundaries. His letter also reminds me of how much in the dark we still are with so much of Congress. After all, with earmarks, we are talking a minute sliver of the federal budget. Why not bring the same standards of disclosure and accountability to the rest of government spending?